Improvised Explosive Devices: Bonus Webby Edition

We had an event yesterday at New America to launch a research paper by Alec Barker entitled “Improvised Explosive Devices in Southern Afghanistan and Western Pakistan, 2002-2009” (pdf). Also participating was Montgomery Meigs, the retired general who ran the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization during the worst days of the Iraq war, and whose work in reducing the effectiveness of the statistically average I.E.D. by a factor of six was chronicled in a terrific series by Rick Atkinson entitled “Left of Boom.” Barker’s paper uses mainly open-source information to create time-lapse maps that document the simultaneous rise in I.E.D. attacks by the Taliban and Baluch separatists after 2005, in and around Quetta—even though the two insurgencies were entirely distinct. The Internet, cash marketplaces, and informal alliances among insurgents seem to explain the extent to which bomb-making innovation crosses geographical and ideological lines much faster than it did previously. It’s sort of the Moore’s Law of asymmetric conflict. Meigs said during the discussion that we were not so much in an era of “asymmetric war” as of “idiosyncratic war.” I’m not entirely sure what that means but it’s a winning phrase.

Bonus paragraph: It is has come to my attention that Think Tank has been nominated for a Webby Award in the political blog category. Good grief! I’m honored, and sincerely thankful to whomever is responsible, but if this means I have to write more posts I’m going to have to figure out once and for all how to halt time’s march. Our competition appears to include the entirety of The Huffington Post and the entirety of The Atlantic’s politics channel, among others, so I would like our chances better if there were a subcategory, “Obscure but Surprisingly Compelling Research Papers About Afghanistan.” Anyway, you can go vote for Stephen Colbert or other favorites. Twitter, alarmingly, is currently in first place.

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.